by Jennie Jones
‘Too easy,’ Sarah said. ‘She didn’t speak to me, by the way, but I chatted a bit anyway.’
‘That’s kind of you. She does talk—to me, and to her stuffed animals.’ And to Tom Wade. ‘And occasionally to others.’
‘I heard about her not talking.’
Adele had been in town over a week, and had discovered—without quite accepting—that everyone knew everyone else’s business and was quite happy to chat about it. It was a vastly different environment to the crowded Sydney suburbs where people passed you without a glance.
‘My cousin’s boy,’ Sarah said, ‘went through a period where he didn’t talk. Nobody could work out why, not the psychologists nor the teachers. In the end, they found out that he’d stopped talking because his pet snake had died. Apparently he had an association with the animal. One only he knew about, obviously.’
Adele blinked throughout the story, wracking her brain for something similar that might have happened to Ali, but they didn’t have pets. She’d be willing to consider anything—any reason why Ali had stopped talking.
‘He used to tell the snake his secrets and all his problems,’ Sarah continued, ‘and when it was no longer around, he had no-one to tell his worries to—he was only nine—so he just shut up. Not a word from him. None at all.’
‘He talked again, eventually?’ It must have been a painful time for the parents. Almost unimaginable. At least Adele knew that Ali spoke.
‘Oh, yes, eventually. He found himself a new friend at school and just started talking again. So don’t you worry about your little one, she’ll come out of it.’
But when? And how? Did Ali need a friend? School might help, but how could you force a child to take a friend?
‘You’ll have a lot on your plate,’ Sarah said, pointing at the pile of documents in Adele’s hands. ‘With the many tasks we’ve given you.’
‘True,’ Adele admitted. ‘But I’m happy to have them.’ It was so much better than being stuck in a level twenty-four office with no natural light and only air conditioned through a tank. In her new town, she was going to be not only occupied, but useful.
Something crossed Sarah’s face. An emotion. Adele instantly thought it might have been sadness. She turned to see what it was that had caught Sarah’s attention.
Imelda had just come through the door. She was wearing her usual attire of jeans and checked shirt and right behind her was Tom Wade.
Adele’s heart jumped a beat.
He carried a cardboard box and he bent his head to listen to whatever his grandmother was saying to him. He nodded, and headed for the trestle table where all the other goods had been deposited.
Adele hadn’t seen Tom since he’d drilled new brackets into her living-room wall and possibly into her heart. She’d seen him in a new light that day—an attractive light. It was probably nothing more than the newness of her situation and gratitude for the welcome she’d received but she couldn’t put her finger on why this taciturn man made her so aware of everything she touched, sensed or saw when she was in his presence.
***
‘How’s it going, kid?’ Tom pulled his hands from his pockets, where he’d stuffed them in an I’m not in the mood for chit-chat manner as he walked through the hall, and sat next to Ali. At least here, on the far side of the hall, he wouldn’t have to make conversation.
Ali handed him a sheet of paper and a blue crayon.
‘No thanks. I prefer an HB graphite pencil.’
‘What would you draw with it?’
‘I’d calculate the weight, angle and reeve factor for a load.’
‘I’d draw the sky.’ She returned her attention to her sketchpad.
Tom grinned. He admired her resilience. She couldn’t possibly understand what he was saying but she didn’t care. She accepted him. He leaned forwards, elbows on his knees and sighed. His bank hadn’t been so keen to ignore his facetiousness.
He glanced around the hall and settled on the child’s mother. Adele was smiling and nodding, accepting another photograph album from a town resident. She had a queue in front of her. He looked her up and down, taking note of the slim body, the grace in her stance and his physical response to her.
Why did she look so goddamn dewy all the time? She didn’t have anything. No money. No makeup. No family he knew of, except the kid. Was there ever a day when she didn’t produce that sweet, lips-tilted, heavenly smile? She stood there, chatting and accepting, with an aura of contentment around her, and Tom felt resentment rise from his gut to his windpipe. Not at Adele, but at himself for being so gullible where she was concerned. For wanting her. For missing her like hell these last two days. For wanting to kiss her and hold her while persuading her to get into bed with him.
There were times when a guy needed to keep his focus somewhere other than the knee-jerk reaction of falling in lust. Just his luck that he’d be moving next door to his knee-jerk reaction tomorrow.
***
Adele lifted her gaze from the boxes on the trestle table to check on Ali. She was still drawing, Tom sitting next to her. He wasn’t looking at Ali; his focus seemed to be on the floor. Even from this distance though, she could see strain on his face. He held it in his body too, fingers interlocked as though they might shatter if he unlaced them, head down as though contemplating the worst thing to have happened to him.
She wondered what had occurred in the last two days, and was drawn to his comments the other day as he fixed the brackets for her curtain rail. Had he been telling the truth about moving into the house next door? Or had it been one of his off-hand witticisms in an attempt to scare her off? Perhaps she’d done too much chatting for his liking that day. There’d been a pull between them though, she’d felt it, inside and out. Her chest had tightened and her skin had prickled. Perhaps he’d felt that strange pull as much as Adele had. Perhaps he hadn’t liked the idea of Adele feeling anything. He hadn’t struck her as the type of man to fall victim to anything or anyone.
She returned to the box he’d placed on the trestle table for Imelda. It was labelled ‘Rose Douglas’, not Wade. Adele had organised the society into small groups and they were currently sorting through their own photographs. She’d urged them to write in pencil on the back, so that there was an approximate date and a name of not only the people or the items in the photographs, but also a thread back to the owner.
She’d sorted through two boxes while her group of seniors joked and laughed as they remembered old times. There was so much history here, all kept securely wrapped in newspaper and cardboard boxes. No longer on display, but not forgotten.
She pulled the next vase from Imelda’s—or Rose’s—box. She’d uncovered two vases so far, and the conical shape of this parcel told her it was a third. What the reference to Dulili was, she didn’t know, but each vase was handmade, possibly Arts & Crafts era. They’d been hand-painted too, and quite beautifully, to Adele’s untrained eye. Eucalypt leaves were interwoven with scenes of lizards on rocks and small native animals at watering holes.
Why Imelda had Rose Douglas’s box and why she’d brought it in, Adele didn’t know. The photographs, mostly framed, were of people Adele didn’t recognise as being the Wades.
She carefully unwrapped the latest item from its sheath of twenty- or thirty-year old newspaper. If it wasn’t for the photograph of the Dulili pub, she might have discarded it. She smoothed the newssheet onto the table top and checked the date. Thirty years ago.
CHILD IN BED AS HOUSE GOES UP IN FLAMES
Residents of Dulili, a village south-east of Orange, were today trying to come to terms with the after-effects of a fire in the vicinity of the town.
First reports were that the fire was deliberately set. Katrina Wade, a 23-year-old single mother who lives in the house, cannot be located for comment and appears to be missing. There is speculation that her son, Tom Wade, age 4, was asleep in his bedroom at the time the fire started.
“There was nothing we could do. The house was a goner when we
arrived,” 44-year-old Rob Wynther, resident of Dulili, said. “We just watched it burn.” Mr Wynther couldn’t verify the reports that the child was in the house at the time. “He wasn’t there. He couldn’t have been because he’s alive. He’d have died almost instantly in a blaze that big.”
Another report suggests that a gas bottle in the adjoining shed exploded, starting the fire that quickly burned through the weatherboard and reached the house. Neither the police nor the fire department have confirmed the cause of the blaze. Mr Wynther alleges that Miss Wade and her father, Samuel Wade, 51, did not get on and that there had been previous arguments between the father and daughter.
Katrina Wade is known to have been treated for alcoholism. Residents say she had returned to Dulili because she was out of work. Her father reportedly refused to have her or the child in his home and her mother, Imelda Wade, 45, set her up in her own property out of town.
The child is now with his grandmother in Dulili. His grandfather is alleged to be searching for his daughter.
Adele looked up and over to Tom, her heart hammering.
Chapter Five
‘That equipment is worth millions of dollars. They can’t auction it!’
Tom stalked the small living room in his new abode on Thompson Street, his mobile glued to his ear. He’d got used to the pressure of the damned phone against his ear, but not the pressure inside him that was going to blow if his damned lawyer didn’t step in and end this.
‘You’ve got no choice, Tom,’ his lawyer told him, frustration at Tom’s resistance evident in the rise in tone. ‘It’s not up to you.’
‘It’ll bring in peanuts!’ What the hell were these people thinking? Tom had twenty-two employees waiting to hear if they’d receive their due superannuation money and the promised bonuses Wade Rigging gave every employee every year. He was going to be the one who had to tell them, Sorry, guys, looks like you’ll only get peanuts. But hey, life is life, huh? Just start again. Oh, and by the way—I’ll be going to jail—so that might make you all happier as you face destitution.
‘The bank has foreclosed. You’re almost bankrupt, Tom.’
‘I don’t give four kinds of flying shit!’
‘Tom!’ The impatience in his lawyer’s tone must be airborne in his level-sixteen Canberra office. ‘You didn’t own all of the equipment, the bank did. They’ve called in your loan and now they’re looking to recoup whatever they can.’
‘Jesus effing Christ!’ Tom knew all this but he couldn’t halt his frustration. ‘Maxwell will be the first through the door at the auction,’ he told his lawyer. ‘Is there some way we can preclude him from attending?’
‘What the hell for? He’s the man most likely to buy.’
‘Because he’s the man who’s been taking my business for the last seven weeks—behind my back—while my employees are going without work or pay and my friend lies in a hospital bed trying to cope with being paralysed from the waist down!’
‘Stop shouting, Tom, it’s not helping.’
***
Adele winced at the sound of her neighbour’s raised voice. He’d been shouting for an hour. Thank God Ali wasn’t in the house.
She winced a second time, although that was down to grumpiness, not Tom’s swearing. She’d cleaned the house in record time. She’d made more chocolate-chip cookies than a Boy Scout team could get through in a day and now she was heading outside to use her pent-up frustration on her front garden.
Ali had gone to school.
She yanked the front door open, dropped the cardboard box full of gardening tools onto the path and wondered if she could rip up the old concrete without a pickaxe. She felt as though the pressure inside her might give her enough strength to push a mountainous range into the ocean.
The front door slammed next door.
Adele started and stared at Tom. He strode to the end of his path—all of two giant steps—then thrust his hands into his jeans pockets and muttered.
‘Stop swearing.’
He spun around and stared back at her with a frown. ‘Morning,’ he said at last. ‘How’s life?’
‘Better than yours.’
His response to her mood was a removal of the frown and a smile that made him so enigmatically handsome that all the temper inside her floated away.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘Business. You’ve probably heard about my problems.’
‘I’ve heard most of it through the wall.’
‘Yeah, well.’ He kicked a broken piece of concrete on his path. It flew onto the garden bed of weeds.
‘Have you lost your business?’ she asked.
‘Barring the paperwork.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not me I’m worried about.’
The gruff voice, the set of his shoulders, the bowed head and the deep frown gave Adele an inexplicable desire to touch him. To sooth the troubles with a sweep of her hand over his shoulder and down his arm.
She pulled herself together. ‘Ali went to school.’
‘Shit!’ He took his hands out of his pockets and leaned on the fence between their houses. ‘I can swear,’ he told her. ‘She’s not here. But I apologise for the other swearing. I forgot where I was living. How’s it going?’
‘School? I don’t know.’ Which was harder to cope with than dropping Ali off had been this morning. ‘I’m waiting for a phone call.’
He glanced at her house. ‘You got the telephone hooked up?’
‘Yes. It’s cheaper than a mobile. It came with an internet package.’
‘And I’m guessing you’ve got the phone sitting just inside the front door, with the ringer turned high.’ He gave her another smile, its understanding, slightly wicked slope peeling another layer of self-preservation from her.
All right, so she needed to talk to someone. Why else would she have blurted out about Ali being at school when it was so obvious he was distracted by his own worries?
‘It’s what mothers do,’ she told him, challenging his confident smile with a grin, although hers wobbled a bit because something inside her chest—okay, her heart—was bouncing. Being the recipient of Tom Wade’s hardly-ever-there genuine smile was a bit like understanding for the first time how sexy an enigmatic-looking guy wearing a tool belt was. It was his inner strength too, she had to admit it. That a man could make her feel protected, or at the least understood, was so new to her that she didn’t know which way the notion would take her.
He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s eleven forty-five and no drama from the kid.’ He looked at her. ‘So why don’t we pool resources and get your bloody awful-looking front yard into shape? That way we can both forget our respective troubles by taking frustration out on two linear metres of crap concrete.’
‘Deal.’ She didn’t ask why he kept calling Ali ‘the kid’. Perhaps in an hour or so, she’d ask him. If they continued to settle each other’s frustrations with hard, co-operative work.
***
Tom threw another lump of concrete into the wheelbarrow he’d got from his kitchen. Second load. The first was on the back of his ute. Adele was on her knees, pulling weeds like they were enemies to be plucked from her existence and throwing them into Tom’s wheelie bin, which would also go up onto the back of his ute when she’d filled it.
He had a quick thought about why most of the furniture he’d decided to keep from his palace in Canberra was still loaded on the Haul-it-Yourself trailer he’d parked in the street, while the tools of the building trade he’d had before Wade Rigging were sitting in organised order in his kitchen. Then he shrugged the issue off. What did it matter? He’d only be in Dulili for as long as it took him to finalise his business and start another one.
‘You can take some of the paving slabs from the back of my garden if you like,’ he said to Adele. ‘For a new path. I won’t need them.’
‘You aren’t going to do up your own front?’
‘Not unless I have to.’
‘So why
are you helping do up mine?’
He paused, took his safety glasses off and rested his hand on the handle of the pickaxe. ‘It’s coming up to three o’clock. Still no news from the kid, so settle down.’
She angled her fine-looking chin. ‘Why do you keep calling Ali “the kid”?’
Resistance. Tom was no fool, not even with himself. He’d already acknowledged that Adele made him weak at the knees and that he desperately wanted to hold her, to pull her body into his and feel her. That was lust, and he could live with it. The kid was an entirely different matter. An extreme high risk—one he hadn’t been trained for and didn’t hold a licence for. The kid needed him and he didn’t want her to. So why was he about to ask what he was about to ask?
‘What happened to her?’
Adele sank back to sit on her haunches, gloved hands on her thighs. ‘I don’t know.’
It wasn’t the first time Tom had thought about what had happened to Ali Devereux, cute pixie-like kid with long brown hair and serious eyes. ‘She doesn’t look lonely,’ he said. ‘She looks more … not interested.’
Adele nodded. ‘I know. She doesn’t mind doing the things she’s supposed to do. Like this morning when I dropped her at school.’
Tom saw how hard that must have been for Adele in the veil of distress in her eyes. She’d lost that concern over the last hours as they dug and pulled and heaved. Even when they’d stopped for coffee and Tom had eaten eight chocolate-chip cookies to her one, they hadn’t discussed anything about the kid. They’d talked about the town—just general stuff. All right, he’d steered the conversation that way because he didn’t want to see the concern in her peer-into-your-soul eyes.
‘I took her into the classroom,’ she said, ‘kissed her cheek, smoothed her hair—everything I’ve always done. Cath came forwards and took Ali off me. She just went.’ She lifted her shoulders. ‘No tears, no questions, no resistance.’
No response. Shit, that’d be hard. How did you fix something when you didn’t know what was wrong? ‘Then what did you do?’
‘I stepped back and closed the schoolroom door but had to stay to peek through the glass panels to watch what happened next.’